River

James Matthew Wilson's "The River of the Immaculate Conception"

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o’er-flowing full.

–from “Cooper’s Hill” by John Denham

Rivers — they inspire words. Denham, Hemmingway, Maclean, and James Matthew Wilson

Trickle

In March 2018, after Wilson found out his wife was expecting their fifth child, he sat down and wrote a poem — “To An Unborn Child.” Its publication instigated the most prolific period in his life. Included in this season of work is a small chapbook, seven poems, called The River of the Immaculate Conception. It is the companion piece to Frank La Rocca’s Mass of the Americas. Since March, I’ve been steeping in both works in preparation to sing this choral piece.

Wilson and I chatted over Zoom, and I noticed a guitar in the background. He said he does not have a substantial background in music.

“I’ve always played instruments casually and poorly,” he said.

Which means he has something in common with La Rocca.

“Frank tells me also plays instruments casually and poorly. He’s a composer; he’s not really a performer,” Wilson said.

Rivulet

Writing The River of the Immaculate Conception was a zenith in Wilson’s work. He was already writing devotional poetry and striving to write poetry that is truly lyric — as in lyric like Shakespeare, lyric like Augustine.

“His Confessions sounds like it’s about to burst out of temporality and into the presence of God,” he said.

With River, Wilson wrote poems both lyrical and liturgical — streams he’d already explored, but now more fully. Previously Wilson wrote a collection called The Hanging God, built around the Stations of the Cross, but he didn’t feel like he achieved anything new in the process.

“I had a sense of melancholy and failure,” he said.

Wilson kept writing. He did a sequence of poems for Advent and Christmas called The Christmas Preface, moved a little further up, a little further in. Then he was commissioned by the Benedict XVI Institute to write what became this slim blue chapbook. Poet Dana Gioia recommended Wilson as someone who could do the job.

“If God’s concerned about things this small, I think I wrote Stations and Christmas in order to get ready to write The River of the Immaculate Conception,” he said.

Wilson had not met the composer, La Rocca, when he had the first idea — one he had carried with him since fourth grade in Mrs. Rambo’s classroom at St. Thomas Aquinas School in East Lansing, Michigan.

“When I was asked to write a poem in response to the Mass, all of these memories and desires just came rushing back,” Wilson said. “Her depiction of American history was very different than the typical education. She put the Catholic life of the Americas front and center, particularly for Michigan, with its Jesuit missionaries.”

Stream

Four of the poems are narrative and tell the story of Catholicism in America, referencing such figures as Cabeza de Vaca, Fr. Luis Cáncer, St. Rose of Lima, St. Martin de Porres, and St. Junipero Serra, along with Mission San Xavier del Bac. The poems “Presentation of the Gifts” and “Gloriosa Dicta Sunt de Te” include a personal turn.

Three of the poems focus on particular historical figures: “The Hymn of Juan Diego,” “The Agnus Dei of Jacques Marquette,” and “The Song of Elizabeth Seton.” Each person touches a different part of the American Catholic story.

“Juan Diego is representative of the Hispanic and Indian culture in the Americas. Marquette is representative of French Catholicism. Seton is this distinguished convert from Anglo America,” Wilson said.

The first performance of Mass of the Americas was on December 8, 2018, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, following the annual Cruzada Guadalupana, a 12-mile pilgrimage to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose feast day is December 12. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone conceived of the idea for the music, and the first performance was at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco.

“I marvel at the mystery of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, how it was more directed at the Spanish Europeans than at the Aztec-Indians. It was a revelation that those already devoted to Mary and her Son needed to realize the full brotherhood with those they had just conquered,” Wilson said.

Writing about Marquette linked Wilson with his Michigan roots.

“Marquette is buried 90 minutes from where I’m sitting,” he said. “He, like most of the Jesuits, went into the American wilderness expecting to die there. He expected that his constitution was weak and that he would die of his own physical weakness, which is what happened.”

In 1673, Marquette and five other Jesuits traveled down the great river we call the Mississippi. They named it The River of the Immaculate Conception. Wilson knew the poem about that river had to center the collection. However, that particular poem began with details about the Meskousing River in Wisconsin, which Pére Marquette and his companions traveled before they reached the Mississippi.

“The poem began the moment I was reading the account of the Marquette journey to Mississippi, and it described the wild rice on the Meskousing stream. Those are the details out of which poems are made,” he said. “My general procedure is to wait for luminous details that bring the world of these missionary saints to life.”

How beautiful, descending the Meskousing stream,

To slip along soft waters, marshy with the cream

Of wild rice. As they passed, the birds rose in a cloud

And flapped one great arc through the sky until it bowed

Back to the water and hid once again in reeds,

Whose stalks brushed the canoe and filled its floor with seeds.

Marquette knew it as a place through which a man may pass

As unremembered guest, as breath upon cold glass,

And spoke into that emptiness a further vow:

To dedicate to Mary all that she’d allow.

–from “The Agnus Dei of Jacques Marquette”

Wilson said he paired Marquette’s story with the Agnus Dei because of “his willingness to be a suffering lamb.”

He included Elizabeth Ann Seton because she was the first U.S. citizen to be named a saint. When Wilson taught at Villanova University, not far from Seton Shrine, he found in the Villanova library a memoir written by Seton’s grandson, a monsignor, along with her letters and journals.

“She really came alive when I was reading her own words. Her letters are wonderful. She was a tremendous writer,” Wilson said.

He included some of her words in the poem and focused on her life prior to her conversion. He added a hint of the satirical style of Jane Austen because Seton’s writing style is similar. There are twelve stanzas of her history, one of her conversion, and one of her legacy, as Mother Seton.

“I felt like what needed to be said was her becoming a mother to the church, taking her place with the Immaculate Conception in America,” he said.

Brook

The Mass of the Americas is very Marian. The first hymn, “El Cantico del Alba,” goes Ave Maria in the very first line. The piece also contains all four Marian hymns sung at the end of Night Prayer throughout the church year. The Offertory is a sung setting of the Latin Hail Mary, and it was the first piece La Rocca wrote when he returned to the Catholic church after an absence of more than 40 years.

All this is fitting because the French Jesuits, who rode in their canoes along the waters that break from the Great Lakes, were very Marian.

“The Jesuits were true devotees to the Immaculate Conception. Their devotion is much older than our doctrine [1854, from Pope Pius IX],” he said. “Jesuits named everything they could for the Immaculate Conception. They wanted to paint the world with Mary’s colors.”

As I typed while Wilson talked, I abbreviated Immaculate Conception as IC. Later I did a find/replace, and Word gave me, in all caps, IMMACULATE CONCEPTION a good ten times. It was like Fr. Marquette and St. Juan Diego and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton were all there, in the algorithmic gears, shouting, Mary! Mary! Mary!

Wilson is a highly awarded formalist poet. He is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in creative Wwriting at University of St. Thomas-Houston, which focuses on writing poetry of form. And form was how he wrote the seven poems in The River of the Immaculate Conception.

“The form leads in directions you might not have anticipated,” he said.

The poems for the three historical figures are all variations of the English ballad measure.

“Juan Diego is a traditional, standard hymn, ABAB quatrains,” he said. “English poets would sometimes lengthen the ballad quatrain and call it a fourteen-er. That practice also follows standard French meter, with twelve-syllable couplets in hexameter — the Alexandrine couplet. It’s the standard couplet in French poetry. I gave that to Marquette as the heart of the poem, since the Mississippi River is the heart of the country.”

For Seton, it was important to Wilson that her poem and Juan Diego’s were about the same length. (Marquette’s, like the river itself, stretches long.) He also wanted Seton’s poem to reflect the time period in which she lived.

“It’s at the turn from the 18th to the 19th centuries when they began experimenting with the ballad measure, complicating it. Most common was to add two more lines and a third rhyme,” he said. “Her poem is the kind of variation common to her time, in tetrameter.”

River

In this collection Wilson recaptured the storytelling stature that poetry has held throughout history. He says narrative poetry is a lost art, once highly prized.

“I argued in The Vision of the Soul that the hierarchy of arts, going back to the ancient world, was always rooted in how narrative a work of art was. Epic was the highest form because it could contain the whole story of the people. In painting, a landscape was okay, but put Julius Caesar there and it’s suddenly more important,” he said.

With this chapbook Wilson hoped to write narrative poetry that reached beyond story to what he called “timeless expression” — to stoke memory of stories forgotten. Stories that move us to praise worthy of God Most High.

“We love stories,” he said, “because of the role they play in serving the memory of our people, the memory of the church, and ourselves as individuals.”

Wilson, as a particular person, is a Michigander and a Midwesterner. A kid who, despite Mrs. Rambo’s instruction, grew up with the not-uncommon perception that history happened somewhere else.

“T.S. Eliot refers to the Midwest as never having formed a culture — that’s just not true,” he said. “I love the Midwest and never want to leave it again. There is a Here here.”

Like another Midwesterner, Wilson is haunted by waters: the Red Cedar, the Two Hearted, the Schuylkill, the Grand, and the Immaculate Conception.

I live far from Michigan, in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. Our particular city on a hill was and still is built by prayer and hard work and never enough rain. Our river, the Pedernales, has been mostly dry for as long as I can remember.

We sang the Mass of the Americas on Sunday, June 1, at 3 p.m., the hour of Divine Mercy, with a small orchestra and handbells.

Many Waters

“How does one make a song of holiness?

–from “VII: Hasten to Aid Thy Fallen People”

Too often we think of holiness as rigidity, rather than as river. Holiness contains many waters and flows and flows, and we grab a canoe or lash together logs to make a raft and float for all we’re worth.

“Deep waters cannot quench love,” says the poet of Song of Solomon, “nor rivers sweep it away.”

Love, pure and clear, gentle and strong, runs in the rivers of the Americas. How do we make a song of such holiness? How do we make its heart our theme?

We simply sing.

That bearing out the Virgin’s hastening aid

From ruined choirs some good may be remade.

–from “VII: Hasten to Aid Thy Fallen People”